


guess who?

by nuest95s



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Bluesey - Freeform, F/M, M/M, post-trk, pynch cameo, trc, trc au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 16:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4270164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuest95s/pseuds/nuest95s
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>gansey surprises blue at college. proceed with caution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	guess who?

Blue Sargent knew she couldn’t possibly take any more of it.

The crushing feeling in her chest that her presence in this room brought, tempered only slightly by the understanding that it was almost over.

Only a week, she told herself. Only a week until break.

Exams had never exactly been pleasant, but now, it was worse somehow. She had stubbornly continued to think that this strange distress was due to the snow carpeting everything in sight. She never thought she would miss the Henrietta heat, but here she was, desiring the sun thrumming on her back still.

The School For Ecology demanded that she go to university in its off months, which happened to fall in the colder parts of the year. Her scholarship paid for it all, and she was certainly grateful for the opportunity, but she couldn’t shake the desire for the humidity of her hometown.

But this was her second year of this, and she knew that her displeasure stemmed from something much more tangible, but also farther out of her hands.

The night before, she had laid on her bed—a simple thing emblazoned with bright souvenirs of her time in Central America—closed her eyes, and called Gansey. He was thousands of miles away—her basic understanding of the geography between them yielded just that—but his voice was right there, next to her ear, and she couldn’t help but feel better for it.

One week.

“Jane,” he said pleasantly. She didn’t answer; she was too busy trying to absorb the quiddity of the moment, the quiddity of him. Maybe she could take this fragment of a voice and keep it with her until the week was over and she was back in Henrietta.

“What are you doing?” Blue asked. It was a little game of theirs, and she could hear—feel—his grin through the phone.

“Studying. For my midterm. Which is in six hours.”

“You should probably be sleeping, then.”

“I probably should,” he said, laughing. He paused momentarily, then added, “But I’d never refuse a call from my girlfriend.”

Blue blushed—that word, used in reference to her, along with the affectionate way he said it made her heart ache just a little more. She wasn’t sure she could take it. “I can’t wait until I’m in Henrietta again.”

With you. The unsaid words. With you, with Adam, with Ronan, with Noah.

“About that.” There was a strange uncertainty in his voice, so wholly unfamiliar that she was immediately alarmed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I might not be able to see you in Henrietta,” he said, and the admittance came in one burst of withheld emotion.

“Might?” It was the only thing she could say, laced with dazed bemusement.

“I won’t,” he repeated, with a solemn firmness. “I have to stay over break. There’s a… project.”

Blue couldn’t form the words that later became sentences. The juvenile notions of words floated around in her mouth and she absently thought that they tasted like blood. The taste spread and a faint stab of pain warned that they tasted like blood because they were blood.

“Blue?” Gansey asked, and it was a sad, uncertain thing, reminding her of years before, when she was standing in a churchyard and he was too, except, of course, he was a spirit and he was going to die.

“It’s fine,” she said hastily, but it was too little, too late. “You have fun with your nerd pursuits.”

The insult was dispirited and therefore devoid of all meaning. Gansey realized this and sighed deeply, in his ‘far older than his years’ way that he sometimes did. “I’m sorry, Blue. I would if I could.”

“It’s fine,” she repeated. There was a bizarre noise in the background, something crashing to the ground. A sharp intake of breath soon followed, as well as a muffled response to the crashing.

“Gansey?” she inquired. A low, breathed out curse and then his voice returned to the phone.

“Something’s come up,” came his breathless reply. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Love you.”

A flutter in her chest, then the phone disconnecting. She swore. Even riddled with misery and homesickness, those words were still enough. For now.

Now, she was rewinding their conversation again and again in her head while simultaneously aggressively ignoring every word out of the professor’s mouth. She tapped her pencil against her heavily laden leg. She had covered it in knee socks, tights and leggings, her huge sweater doing the rest of the work for her.

Inside, she was sweating, but she knew the moment she stepped into the December air, she’d be thankful for it. She was sensible that way.

The midterm had passed the day before, and she had only one to go. It was an easy A, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to ace it, handicapped as she was with this startling new development. Blue internally groaned; she had never planned to be one of those girls—the ones who labored over everything that concerned their significant other. She knew, at the heart of it all, she wasn’t. But this small thorn was proving to be more trouble than she had originally thought it would be. She had expected a burst of annoyance and then nothing. In reality, she had thought of nothing else since that night.

She ran her fingers through her dark hair and stopped abruptly when it swished and hit her collarbone. Growing it out was a fun undertaking, one that stopped annually before her trip back to The School of Ecology, when she had to cut it again. But for now, it was strange and long and thoroughly unfamiliar.

Blue glanced at the clock. Five minutes. Could she possibly take the terribleness of having to stay in the cavernous room for that insignificant amount of time? She was thinking that there was a very low chance of it happening when a noise brought her to attention.

“Ms. Sargent?”

“Mmm?” Blue said absently, then flushed deep red when she realized what she had said.

“You seem to be mumbling. Care to share your thoughts with the class?”

“No,” she mumbled. Blue was aware that this wasn’t the most prudent way to respond, but she couldn’t bear to raise her voice.

“Indeed? Make sure that this doesn’t happen again.” The professor’s voice boomed in the capacious room and she winced once it hit her ears.

“Right,” she agreed hastily.

When it finally struck three and the students fled the auditorium, Blue breathed a sigh of withheld relief. She stuffed her frayed books into an even more frayed bag and slung it over her back and just allowed one second for her to reflect over how impossible this all was. Her. At University. With four friends, four impossible friends that she loved more than anything. It had come with a price, yes, but they had paid it.

She couldn’t imagine a world without them.

The buzzing of her phone shook her from her reverie. She swiped her forefinger on the screen. It was a novel thing, shining with money and carelessness. Gansey had bought it for her as a present, insisting that it was his old one. The model had, at that time, been out for a week.

The silvery face of the phone alerted her that she had three messages waiting for her. She internally groaned and tapped on them. One from Adam, one from Maura, and one from the nerdy moron himself. It occurred to her briefly that that was a rather oxymoronic way of looking at him. She clicked on Maura’s.

Dean came over. We tried to prepare for the Christmas dinner. It burnt. All the yogurt is gone. Sorry.

Blue closed her eyes in silent prayer, which was ironic as she wasn’t even a little bit religious, then moved on to Adam’s. She frowned to see it was from last night and decided that her disregard of it was probably due to her throwing her phone across the room after Gansey’s call.

Call me. I heard it snowed. Can’t wait for break!

Blue was elated at this newfound excuse to avoid Gansey’s message and quickly dialed his familiar number. The dial tone buzzed as she made her way from the seats to brick wall exterior of the room. She leaned her head against it, the cold air refreshing, but also stinging.

“Blue?” Adam’s soft Henrietta accent came through, wound through with drowsiness and something else.

“Adam. What are you doing asleep? It’s three in the afternoon,” she chastised. There was a soft groan on his side of the phone, followed by another voice.

“It’s three?” the other voice said. Blue vaguely recognized it as Ronan’s.

“You’re fucking Lynch?” Blue demanded.

“I was fucking Lynch,” he corrected.

“Now we’re spooning,” Ronan added.

“I can’t believe you two,” Blue fumed. “It’s three!”

“And we’re done with our midterms,” Adam replied.

“It’s celebratory!” Ronan agreed. Blue decided that he must be at least a little bit drunk.

“Why didn’t you respond last night?” Adam said, in his logical, straightforward way.

“I was talking to Gansey,” Blue explained.

“Ah.”

“No, not ah,” Blue protested. “It was purely platonic.”

“Ah.”

“Shut up!” Blue said, laughing, and it struck her once again, how they could make her laugh so easily. It was an easy balance, one that was only simple now because it had been constructed years before. She continued, a stupid, shallow, sadness leeching into her voice, “He said that he won’t be able to make it to Henrietta this year.”

“He did?” Adam and Ronan went to the same school, while Blue and Gansey went to two different ones, their tightknit group now scattered in the wind. Still, it seemed strange that he didn’t know of the new development.

“He didn’t tell you?” Blue asked uneasily. A clattering on the cobblestones brought her gaze sharply upward, and she looked up to meet the excited gaze of her roommate, Hattie. Her copper hair was twisted up in something that resembled a bun, with scarves threaded through it that dangled above her layered clothing. Blue put up one finger in the universal gesture for waiting. Hattie obliged, but only by transferring her energy to her face where it simmered, an outrageously wide smile of enthusiasm and anticipation.

On the other side of the phone, Adam said, “Oh… wait. Now I remember. Yeah, it won’t be the same without him.”

“Yeah,” Blue repeated softly.

“Well,” Adam said, and there was a small groan, a shifting of weight on the other side. “I better get out of bed.”

“By out of bed, you mean fuck Lynch again.”

“No,” Adam said, wounded, just as Ronan said smugly, “Yes.”

She laughed again. “I’d better go.”

Their sounds of agreement faded as she clicked the End Call button. She opened the second message.

Sorry again. Make sure to eat something other than yogurt. Love you.

She took a second to lean back against the brick wall of the building again, breathing in melting snowflakes.

“Blue?” Hattie’s unintentionally loud, mildly zealous voice interrupted her small moment of peace. It was worthless anyway, a bubble of bullshit.

“What’s going on, Hattie?” Blue said, unnaturally pleasant. It wasn’t that Blue wasn’t a naturally pleasant person; it was more that Blue tended not to express her opinions in a pleasant way. Strong and spirited, those were words that did a better job.

Blue slipped her phone into her cross-body bag and listened absently as Hattie chattered aimlessly, walking with her to the library.

“…Yeah?” Hattie’s alto rose upward in a question and Blue realized, horrified, that she had tuned completely out.

“I didn’t catch you the first time,” Blue said, but she seemed fine with repeating it.

“I said, don’t you think he must have a girlfriend?”

“Who?”

Hattie let out a long-suffering sigh. “I see I’ll have to repeat the entire thing. Okay, so apparently this guy showed up on campus this morning with a bouquet of flowers. I think they were purple orchids or something. Anyway, they were really expensive-looking. And, oh my god, Blue, he was so hot. I didn’t see him in the morning, but I saw him later, talking to the professors. Talking! To the professors! And he looked happy about it! He must be a really good actor.”

“What does that have to do with a girlfriend?” Blue asked wearily. Whoever this hot guy was, he certainly was not Gansey, and therefore, he meant nothing.

“He’s too hot not to have a girlfriend. But maybe the bouquet of flowers is for an apology. Ooh, or even better: a jealous ex come to reclaim his girlfriend after she broke up with him and got someone else!”

With every possibility, Hattie was growing more and more animated. Blue glared at her, and Hattie merely smiled. One needed a strong stomach to room with Blue Sargent, and Hattie did possess that.

“Anyway, everyone’s all riled up about it,” Hattie finished. “The mystery of the hot guy in the yellow sweater.”

This niggled at Blue; there was something familiar and forgotten in that sentence. A mystery? A hot guy? A yellow sweater? She dismissed it, and found that they were now nearing the large brick building that served as the campus library. Blue was not sure why she was here, only that the dorm made her think GANSEY, and that the coffee shop made her think GANSEY, and that, on top of all that Gansey, what was another place full of Glendower and wasp allergies?

In addition, the library would be comfortably full, in the way that it was directly before break; rife with bundled college students huddled over a novel, or perhaps a phone, with a cup of coffee from the nearby café.

Peeking into the library however, she found it devoid. Blue frowned deeply, turning to Hattie and silently beseeching the lanky redhead to explain the monstrosity that was an empty library.

“Everyone’s over at our dorm,” Hattie explained. “The hot guy’s there and everyone wants to see what the big fuss is about.”

Blue let out a breathy huff of anger and disdain. This was going way too far. She would go over there herself and demand that he be thrown out. But for once, her threats seemed empty. She was out of caffeine-energy, out of sleep-energy, and out of anger-energy. It didn’t seem like she was all that powerful now, with the circles around her eyes. There was a deep ache inside her, a longing. For Henrietta; for her mother and for her friends and yes, somewhere underneath it all, for Gansey. She despised this ache, too close to weakness to be anything but it.

“Whatever,” Blue grumbled. “I need some coffee anyway.”

“Actually,” Hattie interjected, “The coffee machine in the hall is bro—“ She broke off with a sheepish smile at the look Blue shot her. “I’m sure they’ve fixed it.”

“I’m sure,” Blue replied.

She wrapped her scarf closer around her as they set off towards the dorms. They were considerably farther away, and Blue considered getting something before they arrived. Coffee, perhaps, as apparently the dorm did not have it. The ache spread, and she decided that she had lost her appetite.

Hattie seemed to notice this, and regaled her in tales of her own hometown, which she would be returning to soon. Blue had never really thought about parenthood, but listening to Hattie’s stories of being an aunt to the two cutest bundles of joy in the world, she felt a sudden jolt in the form of the question: What about kids?

She dismissed the notion immediately, denigrating it by its connections to lack of coffee and healthy thinking. But it lingered faintly.

Blue groaned deeply, then stretched the sound out into a long suffering moan of despair and disgust. “How long have they been out here?”

She was referring, of course, to the extensive crowd that surrounded the tiny gray building that had served as her home for the past half year. She put her head in her hands, and continued the sound.

Hattie laughed once. “I wasn’t exaggerating.”

“For once,” Blue grudgingly admitted.

Blue shouldered her bag, as if to prepare herself, and dove into the crux of the horde. Due to her inconspicuous form, she had to dodge many an elbow, which was not the most pleasant experience. When she came to the front of the swarm, she found herself staring into the hall of the dorm, nose touched to the frosting glass of the doors. Hattie surfaced beside her. Blue glared at her.

“Where’s the guy?” Blue said. She thought, I’m going to fight him.

Hattie shrugged. “Bathroom break, I guess. Even jealous hot exes need to piss.”

Blue smiled and twisted the doorknob, wet with condensation. She warily made her way inside, Hattie following behind her. The hall was busy, buzzing with the excitement of petty gossip. People were chattering among themselves, cups of half rate café coffee in their blue fingers.

Blue’s contentious impetus was fading quickly, and was replaced with a desire to sleep, preferably with ear buds in.

She turned to Hattie. “I think I’m going to retire for today. Anything else I should know about him?”

“He had an old car; orange. Sounded like hell itself was coming up with it. And,” she pursed her lips, tapping them. “There was something funny about his name. It was long and posh—Something Something Something the second, or possibly the third.”

Blue grinned faintly, hearing this. He sounded like an asshole. She backed up towards the stairs, angling herself so that although she turned toward Hattie, she couldn’t see most of the student body. It occurred to her that she could be mugged in this position, but she didn’t particularly care.

Blue froze, suddenly. Her exam-weary brain had finally understood what it should have figured out long before, its rusty cogs turning the characteristics over in her head until they pointed toward one familiar person.

Hot. Talking to the professors. Boyfriend. Yellow sweater. My dorm. Old, orange car that sounded like hell. Long, posh name that ended in a numeral.

Purple orchids… Blue lilies.

She registered his presence exactly 0.2 seconds before he wrapped his arms around her. Tight, strong arms covered in lemon yellow fabric and pressed to her chest. A strong scent of mint permeated the air. Against her better will, she leaned back into the touch for a second, and he pressed a hand to her eyes.

“Guess who?” Gansey said.

No, Blue decided, I am most definitely going to fight him.

She ignored the gaping stance of both Hattie, and all of her fellow students, and twisted around in his arms so that she could face his Richard-Campbell-Gansey-III-splendor in all its glory. Then, she raised her hand and brought down her palm across his face.

The resounding crack was harmonized with the empathizing ooh of the wince that her colleagues brought.

“You bastard,” Blue spat savagely. “You utter asshole.”

She then proceeded to slap him again.

Gansey took the abuse rather strangely for a boyfriend. He did not stare at her in shock or fury. He did not yell out in shock of fury. He did not raise his own hand in shock or fury.

Instead, he waited for her to finish. He raised a hand to his face and traced the outline of Blue’s tiny handprint, and said, “Sorry.”

Blue tried to stay angry, but it was a fruitless exercise at this point, and her huff of anger turned into a laugh. The laugh grew, until she was out of breath with the effort of it, tears streaming down her face.

Gansey cast her a worried look. “Should I be concerned?”

In response, she laced her hands around his neck, brought herself up to her tippy toes, and pressed her lips to his.

When she broke away, she said, “Something doesn’t make sense.”

They were both mildly aware of the crowd watching them, but at least in Blue’s case, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t one for caring too much about the opinions of others.

“Really?” Gansey asked, amused. “What?”

“You said that you wouldn’t be able to come to Henrietta,” Blue said. “Is that still on?”

“I meant that I wouldn’t be able to wait to see you in Henrietta,” Gansey explained. “It’s a bit complicated, but I didn’t want to lie, and I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“So that crashing sound last night?”

“My suitcase in the airport,” he said. “Everything’s in Henrietta.”

“Well, what about your ‘project’?” She said the last word with a twist to her tone that suggested that she was not fond of it.

He shrugged. “That was a lie.”

She glared and hit him on the arm, but he just faked offense and slung his arm around her shoulders. From this spot, she could see the scars on his arms where he had gotten stung, where he had died and come back. He saw the crease between her eyes and brought her in for a kiss again.

“Come on,” he said, beckoning upstairs. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

…

Gansey had packed sparsely for his trip there, continuing to insist that he had left most of his stuff in Henrietta. Despite that, he had brought a backpack that contained, among others, a book on Welsh history and that infernal mint plant.

They spent a good hour or so kissing, forcing Hattie out of the room. That, Blue thought, had been a very nice sight indeed.

“So,” Hattie had said skeptically, “What are you going to do with my roommate?”

Gansey, utterly unaware of Hattie’s suspicions, had replied, “Well, first I’m going to take her to the chapel up the street and marry her. Then, after the kiss of course, I’m going to scoop her up in my arms and stuff her in the front seat of my Camaro. Lastly, I’m going to kidnap her and run to Henrietta. There may be some more kissing involved.”

She had scowled, a response that Blue wholeheartedly approved of, and replied, “Where did you two meet anyway?”

“High school,” Blue had answered, unwilling to go into the strange circumstances that surrounded their relationship.

“High school sweethearts,” Hattie had cooed.

“Speaking of high school,” Gansey had said, with a gleam in his eyes that Blue found hilarious and unsettling. “What do you know about Welsh kings?”

Even after they had found Glendower and secured their favor, Gansey had never stopped thinking about it. The fact that he was now pursuing a degree in Welsh mythology only illustrated this point more.

Blue had groaned and knocked her head against the plaster walls. “Don’t poison her mind with Glendower, Gansey.”

“I agree,” he had said triumphantly. “It is a poison. It intoxicates you. Look what it did to you, Jane.”

“Nah,” she had grinned and kissed him again. “I only came for the hot guys.”

Hattie had then claimed slow death by disgust and fled the room.

Their shared dorm room was a tiny space occupied by two cot-like beds and trinkets galore. The moment Hattie left, however, everything on Blue’s bed transferred itself to the floor, leaving behind only a girl, a boy, and a mattress.

While they kissed, Blue allowed herself to think about how this was such a small, golden, impossibility, how two years ago, this could never have happened. Two years ago, everything was halves and quarters and dangerously close to wholes but never quite there.

Gansey seemed to realize this, as he pulled back and smiled faintly as he attempted to push back the hair from her face. When it did secure behind her ears, he frowned slightly, and she brought her own finger up to let it loose again.

“Gansey,” she whispered, remembering the conversation she had with Hattie earlier that day. He looked up from the blanket, and the bright hazel of his eyes glowed in the dark room.

“Yeah, Blue?” His voice was made breathy by their proximity and warmed even more by the use of her real name.

“What do you think about kids?” Blue asked, her cheek pressed to his neck.

Gansey smiled—not a Richard-Campbell-Gansey-III dimpled grin, but a lopsided beaming expression that she knew far better. “I think that sounds fantastic.”


End file.
